In the mid-1970s, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (“3M”) invented a useful office product, Post-it® Notes which provides small pieces of paper for people to jot down notes. Post-it Notes® have become very popular and are used today in a myriad of ways, not only in offices but also in homes.
With the advent and penetration of computer technology and the Internet, various computer applications have come to market in an attempt to simulate the Post-it Notes®. These applications allow people to electronically create, store, and send notes.
Although these applications duplicate the function of Post-it Notes®, they do not fully exploit the modern computer's powerful ability to organize information. Generally within these applications, the notes are stored randomly. The applications do not provide much help to organize and identify the notes. People rely on these applications to create notes in a manner similar to how they created paper notes. However, they have to organize and manage those notes by themselves. Advanced note-taking applications such as the Evernote® application exist and are designed to give users a single place to store various types of notes and other information/content. The notes are accessible at any time, in any place (from a computer). Such advance-note taking applications are not limited to storing only text notes.
Although feature-rich, these advanced-note taking applications are limited as they are desktop applications designed to run on a desktop or laptop computer system. As a result, a user can only access his/her notes on the desktop/laptop computer system on which the advanced-note taking application is installed. For universal access to the notes i.e. access at any location the desktop/laptop computer system would have to be carried around. Alternatively, the notes may be saved to portable storage media, such as flash memory card or portable hard disk, which then has to be carried. The latter case does not allow access of the notes on computer systems on which the advanced-note taking application is not installed. This can be very inconvenient and frustrating.
With the advent of the World Wide Web, it became possible to develop web-based note-taking applications. One example of a web-based note-taking application includes Google® Notebook. Such web-based applications retain the basic functions of their desktop peers, but allow a user's notes to be saved on the web. So that the notes may be accessed from any location as long as there is Internet access.
A limitation common to all of the above note-taking application is that they can only be used with computers (i.e. desktop and laptop computer systems), or in some cases with smart devices such as smart phones that approximate the functions of such computers. Although portable computers such as notebooks and tablets are getting lighter and smaller, they are still quite large when compared to a cell phone. Even portable devices such a smart phones are bulky and expensive when compared to a regular cell phone. Moreover, the percentage of people that own smartphone-type devices is still quite small. To address the small screen-size of smartphone-type devices, some companies have provided scaled-down versions of their web-based note-taking applications, but as tradeoff, the functions are limited.
Another limitation of web-based note-taking applications is that they can only be used when an Internet connection is available. Additionally, some web-based note-taking applications may even require a broadband Internet connection. About 30 percent of U.S. families still did not have Internet access at home. Further, broadband adoption is still just over 50 percent. While Wi-Fi technology is being pushed heavily, public “hotspots” is still scarce, and many of them are not free. Cell phone service providers are constructing 3G or 4G networks which can support data network along with voice network. But currently those kinds of network can only cover a few metro cities. Moreover, the devices that support such networks are expensive and the service fee is still high.
On the contrary, the regular voice wireless network is by far the largest network. It covers at least 95 percent of the U.S. population. Furthermore, cell phones are by far the most popular mobile device; at least 70 percent of Americans own at least one cell phone. A vast majority of these cell phones are non-smart phone devices. Since these facts are unlikely to change in the near future, a truly universal “Post-it Notes” application that can be used by most people should incorporate the use of a regular cell phone on a regular wireless network.